The Devil's Dinner Party

Contents

Host

Broadcast

Synopsis

Six strangers are shown into a dining room. They're introduced by the host (referred to as "The Devil's Broker"), and have a brief chat over a pre-dinner glass of wine. The contestants then rank each other from favourite down to least favourite, and the person with the worst rank leaves without even sampling the soup.

The remaining five sit down for dinner, and are spotted £1,000 for their prize pool. In turn, each will be asked a question intended to reveal something about themself. For instance, "Who out of four categories of people would you like to live next door to?" The other four pool their brains to predict what answer will be given, and a correct prediction adds £1,000 to the prize pool.

Repeat this so each contestant faces a poser, a process that takes about half an hour.

There's another elimination here, done almost at random. The contenders pick a card at random, one of the cards is marked. That person has to pick their favourite and least favourite contestants, and their least favoured is off the show.

A final question is posed to one contender, where the answer is one of the other three players. There's another £1,000 in the prize fund for a correct answer, bringing the total prize money to a maximum of £7,000.

Who wins this amount? The four remaining players rate each other again, and the contestant with the highest rating takes the money home.

The Devil's Dinner Party was invented to examine the psychology of middle-class dinner parties, according to a puff-piece in The Times. It was advertised to readers of Radio Times as being for fans of Come Dine with Me, apparently based on nothing more than a) being from the same production company, and b) involving strangers eating a meal. This was wholly misleading: it's entirely a psychological game, without any cookery involved.